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Four decades after television audiences were treated to a bionic man and woman, we finally have the technology to replace lost arms with something more human and natural than the crude poles many have to use today.

The Woman Who Figured Out How To 3-D Print Makeup Explains How It Works Jillian D’Onfro Tech May. 10, 2014, 2:31 AM, businessinsider.sg Choi has created a prototype for a printer called “Mink” that will let users choose any color imaginable and then print out makeup in that exact same hue (at this point, she’s only done demonstrations with blush). By allowing people to skip the expensive department store prices to make the perfectly colored products themselves, Mink could completely revolutionize the makeup industry. She’s being deceptively conservative when she says this product would be targeted at teenaged girls; it has far larger implications for the beauty industry. If every shade and the chemically simple products that allow people to sport them are fully open and commoditized, and large brands have few qualities to offer beyond “packaging”, and the customer knows it, what will happen? Will advertising continue to be able to sustain them by selling a lifestyle, or will the images of beauty grow wider in scope and fragment as new tastemakers emerge from …

Apple’s Pursuit of Beats May Foretell a Shift By BEN SISARIO, nytimes.com If Apple makes a major marketing push for Beats’s subscription model — or, even better, if Apple integrates Beats into its ecosystem of online services and physical products — it could mean a big lift for streaming. Apple entering the streaming music market (virtually overnight) with the clout and installed user base of iTunes would be massive, and it’s probably not an exaggeration to say Spotify’s days as currently structured would be numbered. Looks like we’re in for the next phase of music industry economics. Since the rumor surfaced a couple of days ago, people have tried to rationalize why Apple would buy the headphone and services company. Some good theories and analyses of both brands have resulted; I think it’s fantastic to have lots of smart people simultaneously indulge in a thought exercise, the answers to which we will probably have in the near future. My resistance to the idea has largely been because I’ve heard several pairs of Beats headphones myself, and haven’t been …

From Paper to iPad, Pixel Press Turns Drawings Into Videogames Bonnie Cha, recode.net I loved play­ing videogames as a kid, but I can’t say that I ever spent any time sketch­ing out ideas for my own games like my broth­er and his friends did. (My doo­dles usu­al­ly involved cute ani­mals or spelling out my crush’s name in bub­ble… The core concept is every kid’s dream: designing their own games for friends to play through, or just for the heck of it. But without some serious inspiration, what you can do in a short platformer level is very limited. I remember a D&D game maker tool for PCs in the 90s; that was infinitely better because you could create a STORY, and set up narrative funnels for your players. 20 years later, our idea of imaginative play can’t be restricted to letting kids carve out crude worlds in 3D chunks and 2D lines.

Alexis Madrigal, for The Atlantic: What emerged from the work is this conclusion: Netflix has meticulously analyzed and tagged every movie and TV show imaginable. They possess a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is absolutely unprecedented. Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness. The data can’t tell them how to make a TV show, but it can tell them what they should be making. When they create a show like House of Cards, they aren’t guessing at what people want. What a huge undertaking, and a demonstration of Amazon-like patience for a company like Netflix—slowly, quietly, build a long-view competitive advantage in technology and process that becomes impossible for others to copy, and that eventually enables a whole new range of products that …

This Wristband Could Change Healthcare | Monday Note The corpus of medical observations is based on classic clinical tests of a small number of patients. On the other hand, Jawbone thinks of the UP wristband — to be worn 24/7 by millions of people — in a Big Data frame of mind. Hosain Rahman is or will soon be right when he says his UP endeavor contributes to the largest sleep study ever done. Monday Note examines the Jawbone UP, which I’ve enjoyed using these past two weeks, and explores its implications for the healthcare industry — the real potential of the device — and why Jawbone has received over $200m in funding from investors to date. You might not like where it’s going: giving corporations more data and insight, quite granular at that, into our lives and health statuses, but the potential for good here is also strong. As for me, my use is still going strong; I enjoy the knowledge and statistics, and feel motivated to reach my daily activity goal of 8,000 …

Canon Powershot N first impressions: Digital Photography Review Very intrigued by Canon’s latest consumer product shown off at CES. It’s an almost-square, mint tin-sized box with an 8x optical zoom lens, 12mp resolution, and wireless-N connectivity designed to work with your smartphone. Anything you shoot with it can be instantly shared in the ways you are already accustomed to, and the camera even applies a bunch of artistic filters automatically. This is an interesting and astute reaction to recent trends in consumer photography: namely, people shoot and share an imagebucket load of photos with their smartphones; the more advanced of these photographers care about and strive to eke ever more quality and clarity out of their daily shots, you even see some happy to carry DSLRs around to get shots exclusively for low-res online sharing; the emergence of middle-ground devices such as Micro Four-Thirds cameras, ultra-thin laptops, tablets (hell, even phablets); and of course, the rapid demise of consumer compact cameras for everyday use, having been deemed too much bulk and inconvenience for too little …

British mentalist Derren Brown has done a fair few TV specials, and like the illusionist David Blaine, he started small with entertaining tricks and then started ramping up the scale of his productions, and got a lot of flak for overwrought theatricality and ruining the fun with ever-increasing amounts of required disbelief. His latest, Apocalypse, isn’t about changing that course, but it’s compelling TV because of how extreme a prank it is, and how it digs a sole man/victim/subject deep into a pop-culture reference we’ve all thought about: a zombie invasion. The whole show is about convincing one wayward young man that the end of the world has begun, in an effort to shock him into displaying leadership and responsibility. They staged explosions, helicopters, a military hospital for him to wake up in, and more. It’s in two parts on YouTube — I skipped straight to the second last night, which starts with a helpful recap. Part 1 | Part 2 (videos embedded after the jump)

➟ Brian Regan: The Epitome of Hyperbole [Netflix] Really great, profanity-free stand-up comedy. He brings a lot more energy to the stage than Jim Gaffigan, whose shows we also watched a couple of nights ago. They’re both great acts and worth looking up, but Regan’s older material is rock solid, while you can jump straight to Gaffigan’s newer stuff and not miss much.